1. Field of the Invention
The disclosed embodiments of the present invention relate to video processing, and more particularly, to a video generating system for combining images generated from a plurality of image sensors and related method thereof.
2. Description of the Prior Art
A video generating system with multiple image sensors performs video capture upon the same or different scenes at different angles, positions or distances, thereby providing rich and complete video information. This kind of video generating system needs a back-end circuit for combining different images from different image sensors to generate an output image satisfying user's requirement.
Conventionally, each image sensor transmits its own image data and synchronization signal to the back-end circuit via its own dedicated signal transmission interface, and then the back-end circuit would combine these image data according to the synchronization signals to generate an output image. Regarding such a conventional architecture, please refer to a video generating system shown in FIG. 1. In the video generating system 100, a back-end circuit 130 is arranged for generating an output image by combining an image A and an image B generated from a image sensor 110 and a image sensor 120 respectively. The image sensors 110 and 120 transmit the synchronization signals and image data via respective dedicated signal transmission interfaces 115 and 125. Taking the signal transmission interface 115 for example, it includes a vertical synchronization signal line VSYNC1, a horizontal synchronization signal line HSYNC1, a pixel clock signal line PXCLK1, and a pixel data signal line PXD1. Also, the signal transmission interface 125 has a similar configuration of signal lines.
However, the number of signal transmission interfaces needed by such a signal transmission scheme mentioned above is positively proportional to the number of image sensors. Similarly, the number of input pins of the back-end circuit 130 is also positively proportional to the number of signal transmission interfaces. Moreover, since signals generated by different image sensors are transmitted to the back-end circuit 130, the back-end circuit 130 needs a memory to buffer the received image data and performs re-permutation and re-combination upon the received image data. As a result, the complexity of the video generating system 100 is increased greatly as the number of image sensors is increased, and the back-end circuit 130 needs to be equipped with powerful computation capability and large buffer memory capacity.